Hi everyone
MS Domainer alerted me to this board and the fact that you had some questions, especially about the registration of generic names in the Sunrise period. I can confirm that there were quite a few and that a third party agent, Deloitte, validated all of the trademarks submitted to make sure that they were registered with national effect. There are unfortunately ways and means around registering generic trademarks by registering them as devices, logos or with other strange characters in them. Given our Sunrise period was much stricter than prior TLD launches, we feel we did our best to make this as rigourous as possible.
Now, on to another point. There's lots of discussion about the .tel and what it's good for (or not good for, depending on your perspective). There's no doubt that it's entirely different to anything that's gone before in terms of the TLD world. In fact, there's no point in comparing it to anything that's gone before - it's been designed with a completely different set of objectives in mind. Does that make it uninteresting to domainers? Not according to many domainers I met at DOMAINfest this week in Hollywood.
However, I'd suggest you do as MS Domainer has done and get a free trial account to try out -
http://www.telnic.org/vip. It has pretty much the full functionality now. Then, if you have a mobile device, check it out over your mobile browser as well as a computer browser. Then change your details and see how it reacts. Then check your phone bill when it comes and and check out how little you paid to access that.
I'm going to be a bit busy over the next couple of days with Landrush, but please do email me at the contact information you'll find under justin.tel and I'll do my best to get back to you quickly. Keep asking questions, but please do try out the trial account and get comfortable with a whole new way to monetize domains, especially from mobile devices (hint: see my-idol.tel).
Thanks for the discussion,
Justin
Telnic Limited